This Living Mushroom Coffin Eats And Turns Dead Bodies Into Nutrients

For thousands of years, people have been practicing special burial and funeral rituals to honor the dead but now, when the green burials take the limelight, we are seeking more environmentally friendly ways to house corpses.

The latest inventions following this trend is Loop - a Dutch biotech firm. Dubbed the “Living Cocoon,” the bio coffin is made out of microbes, fungus, and roots. What it does is accelerate the decomposition process while enriching the soil around.

According to Bob Hendrikx, Loop’s founder, humans usually take something out of nature, kill it and use it. So he thought why we didn’t stop being a parasite and started exploring cool materials, including self-healing walls, and living lights.

The idea came to Hendrikx last year while he was presenting the concept of a living home at Dutch Design Week. Houses are for the living obviously but then he thought of applying the same concept to make the final resting places for the dead, using mushroom mycelium, fungus’s filamentary vegetative part.

Hendrikx said mycelium is the most effective recycler of nature and it always looks for dead matters to transform into nutrients.

The Living Cocoon is the joint effort of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center Delft University of Technology and Loop. It consists of a moss bed housing a microorganism ecosystem, plant roots, and mycelium.

The coffin has already been launched and one of them has been used for burial in the Hague.

Tests show that the Living Cocoon degrades after 30 to 45 days and the body inside will be composted after three years. Mushroom can clean the soil of contaminants so its designers want to use the coffin to purify polluted environments in the future.

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